New APS Online Journal Issues Call for Papers

APS is now accepting physics papers for its new online, open access peer-reviewed journal, Physical Review X. Its editors have issued a general announcement to all physicists and institutions, calling for submissions.
“PRX is a new journal from the APS. It’s looking to publish excellent, high quality papers in all areas of physics and related topics,” said Dan Kulp, editorial director at APS.

The first issue of PRX is expected to be published online in September of this year, with new papers added as they work their way through the peer-review process. A table of contents listing the accepted articles will be emailed out quarterly at first, then more frequently as more papers are accepted to the journal.

In some ways PRX is modeled after APS’s flagship publication, Physical Review Letters. “It also covers all of physics,” said Jorge Pullin, who is the Founding Editor of PRX, and Hearne Chair of Theoretical Physics and Professor at Louisiana State University.

The editors hope that PRX will include papers spanning the whole spectrum of physics research. In addition, because of its broad focus, it should attract a lot of interdisciplinary research that would have a more difficult time finding a home in the more specialized journals.

The new publication differs in several respects from other APS journals. The entire journal is open access, meaning that there are no fee or subscription costs to readers who want to access it. In addition, the journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which allows anyone to freely reproduce any amount of the publication as long as the original work is properly cited. Because the journal is online only, there are no limits to lengths of the articles. The journal will be supported by a $1,500 per article processing charge, usually paid by the author or the author’s institution.

The journal should offer physicists the chance to have their research widely read. The number of papers published in the first issues is expected to be relatively small, so each will have a great deal of visibility.

“This is an opportunity to come into the APS community,” Kulp said. “What we’re offering to [authors] is recognition. It is a Phys Rev journal, it’s highly regarded, the journals are generally well read… PRX is going to be as good as it can possibly be, but it’s all contingent on what comes in our front door.”

The decision to make PRX all open access and freely reproducible is part of an effort by APS to give authors more options about the redistribution rights of their work. Already APS has two specialized open access online journals, Special Topics: Accelerators and Beams as well as Special Topics: Physics EducationResearch. In addition, APS recently began offering authors the ability to purchase Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licenses for work published in the subscription-based Physical Review journals.

“Open access is going to be a big part of the future of publications,” Pullin said.

The American Institute of Physics recently started the open access journal AIP Advances, and offers authors the option to buy open access rights in their other journals as well. Many major institutions, such as CERN, have requirements that research originating from them be published under some form of open access license.

Publishing online offers other benefits as well. Pullin said that down the line they hope to incorporate more multimedia into the publications, such as video, animated figures and word tagging.

Authors can find information about submitting their work to the journal at prx.aps.org.

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